Who is right? The available evidence seems to favour aspects of both positions. Röhl is right to stress Wilhelm’s central position within the German constitutional system – no one but he could have convoked the meeting of 8 December – and right in highlighting the extremism of the views put forward by the military and naval figures in attendance. The meeting revealed – though this in itself was nothing new – how established the concept of preventive war was within the leadership of the German armed forces. It also revealed how wide the policy gap had grown between the military and the civilian leadership. While Bethmann continued to direct his diplomacy towards conciliating Britain and isolating Russia, the war plans of the military focused on the ‘inevitable’ war in the west – the ‘Eastern Mobilization Plan’ was abandoned in 1913.30
Nevertheless, Admiral Müller concluded his account of the discussion with the observation that the result of the meeting ‘amounted to almost 0’, and this appears to have been borne out by events. The Army Bill of 1913 was not a consequence of the meeting; the official go-ahead had been given in November 1912 and the proposed expansion was in any case long overdue.31 There was no national propaganda campaign, and the evidence for a concerted government effort to set the economy on a wartime footing remains very patchy.32 As for the absence of Bethmann and Kiderlen, this probably had less to do with the primacy of the military over the civilian power than with Wilhelm’s sense that the two men had gravely erred in holding so adamantly to the view that Britain would remain neutral in a continental conflict.33
The War Council of 8 December remained an episode: by the beginning of January, the sense of crisis in Berlin had dissipated and Wilhelm had regained his calm. Bethmann talked him out of plans for an expanded naval programme, and when a new crisis broke out in the Balkans in April–May 1913 over the Serbian occupation of the Albanian city of Scutari, it was apparent that Wilhelm still opposed any moves that would incur the risk of war.34 The primacy of the civilian over the military leadership remained intact; Moltke’s repeated calls for a preventive war fell on deaf ears. This state of affairs was not lost on the hawkish General Falkenhayn, who observed in a letter of January 1913 that the deluded faith of the political leadership – including Wilhelm himself – in the possibility of a lasting peace left Moltke ‘standing alone’ in his ‘struggle’ with the Kaiser for a more aggressive foreign policy.35 After the shock of December Wilhelm was ambivalent and increasingly pessimistic, but still hopeful of a long-term accommodation with Britain. His remarks during 1913 suggest that he continued to regard an Anglo-German war as ‘unthinkable’. He also remained confident that German military prowess would deter Russia from an armed intervention in a conflict between Austria and Serbia.36
Wilhelm the warmonger?
By the autumn of 1913 the Serbian issue loomed larger than ever. In June 1913 war had once again broken out in the Balkans; the consequence of the conflict was the Peace of Bucharest of 10 August 1913, which allocated substantial new territories to Serbian control, but also confirmed the independence of Albania. The situation remained extremely tense, however, largely because the Serbs were determined to push for more than they had already been given. When a revolt broke out in Albania, Serbian troops moved in to crush it and it quickly became apparent that another Serbian bid for Albania and the Adriatic was in the offing. On 18 October the Austrians responded with an ultimatum demanding a Serbian withdrawal from Albania.
How did Wilhelm respond to this new Balkan crisis? He welcomed the ultimatum, observing in a marginal comment that it was high time ‘order and peace’ were established ‘down there’, and expressing the hope that the Serbs might, by failing to fulfil the conditions imposed, provide the pretext for an Austrian strike against the Serbian army in Albania.37 In a conversation with the Austrian foreign minister, Berchtold, on 26 October 1913, he offered the fulsome assurance that ‘for him, whatever came from the Viennese Foreign Office was an order’.38 This was an excessive and unguarded remark; in the light of later developments it appears, as Klaus Hildebrand has observed, ‘fatally shortsighted’.39 But it would be misleading to interpret it through the lens of July–August 1914, for it was made in a context where German support for the Austrian action under consideration – an ultimatum forcing the Serbs out of Albania – could be offered at no risk to Germany or to European peace: in the autumn of 1913 the Great Powers were in full agreement that Serbia’s demands for a chunk of Albania were illegitimate and effectively supported Austria–Hungary in rejecting them. Even Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, conceded that ‘Serbia had been more to blame than was generally supposed in the events which led up to the recent ultimatum’, and St Petersburg lost no time in urging the Serbs to yield.40
It is clear, nevertheless, that Wilhelm’s flamboyant, aggressive and careless language makes it easy to set him up as an inveterate warmonger. It is not difficult to unearth quotations in support of Willibald Gutsche’s view that ‘after the turn of 1913/14 the Kaiser was merely waiting for an advantageous opportunity to begin the war’.41 Gutsche has cited a number of written and spoken utterances by Wilhelm from the last twelve months before the outbreak of the First World War that appear to bear out his case.
(i) In December 1913 there was tension between Russia and Germany over the appointment of the German officer Liman von Sanders to the command of the Turkish First Army Corps in Constantinople. Having read a report on this issue, Wilhelm declared in a marginal comment: ‘This is a matter of our reputation in the world against agitation from every quarter! So stand erect and your hand to your sword!’42
(ii) To a report of 11 March 1914 from Ambassador Pourtalès in St Petersburg, Wilhelm appended the comment: ‘I have after reading all my reports not the slightest doubt that Russia is systematically preparing war against us. And I conduct my policy accordingly.’43 (Gutsche cites these latter remarks as evidence that Wilhelm had by this point fully internalized the programme of preventive war expounded by the chief of the German General Staff, General von Moltke.)
(iii) On 11 June 1914, during a sojourn with Franz Ferdinand at his palace in Konopischte near Prague, Wilhelm allegedly declared that ‘if the Austrians did not take action [against Serbia], the situation would worsen’.44
(iv) In an oft-cited conversation with the Hamburg banker Max Warburg on 21 June 1914, Wilhelm is reported to have asked ‘whether it would not be better to strike instead of waiting’.45
Sound-bites of this kind can easily be pieced together into a programmatic statement that appears to leave no doubt as to the emperor’s bellicose intentions. But they also pose methodological problems. There is the problem of distinguishing between momentary expressions of opinion and programmatic utterances that may have a direct impact on policy. Can an irritable or harshly worded marginal note be seen as contributing directly to policy-formation? In the light of what we have seen of the workings of the Wilhelmine foreign-policy process, this would seem, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a doubtful assumption; the same applies a fortiori to remarks passed at a dinner table. One often senses a disparity between the carelessness with which remarks were thrown away by Wilhelm and the earnestness with which they are cited by historians.
A further and more fundamental problem is context. For it is context which bestows meaning upon acts of speech and makes the motivations for them intelligible. The importance of this reservation becomes clear if we re-examine the remarks cited above. In the case of (i), the documentary context makes it clear that this marginal flourish is a martial metaphor, not a literal exhortation to prepare for war. It refers to the need to remain firm in the face of Russian protests; there is no reference – implied or explicit – to military complications, nor would this have been appropriate in view of the issues raised in the document.46 In any case, five days later, in his comments on a further report from the ambassador in Constantinople, Wilhelm struck a far more conciliatory note: ‘The Russians for their part should be patient, we will see to it that R[ussian] conce
rns are laid to rest and that all R[ussian] wishes whose fulfilment can be reconciled with Turkish prestige are considered.’47
As for the remarks recorded under (ii), they hardly demonstrate a commitment to preventive war, although they do reflect Wilhelm’s alarm at reports concerning the scale and anti-German focus of the latest cycle of Russian rearmaments, and his determination to be prepared for the worst.48 As for Wilhelm’s oft-cited remarks to Max Warburg (iv), the banker himself summed up his account of the Kaiser’s dinner-table talk with the observation that ‘I did not have the impression that [the Kaiser] was seriously thinking about a preventive war…’49
If Wilhelm had been committed in any meaningful sense to the idea of a preventive war against Russia or against Russia and France in combination, then we might expect the sources to document this in the form of gestures of support for a course of open provocation. This is precisely the intention imputed to Wilhelm by Willibald Gutsche with regard to the remarks cited under (iii). But here again we run into problems: no transcript survives of the meeting between Wilhelm and Franz Ferdinand at Konopischte in June 1914. Gutsche’s quotation derives from a third-hand account allegedly passed from the archduke via a Colonel Metzger to Conrad von Hötzendorf, chief of the Austrian General Staff, who subsequently recorded it in his diaries.50 But Metzger’s account conflicts with the very different version of events conveyed by the archduke to the Austrian emperor. According to this alternative account, also related in Hötzendorf’s memoir but not cited by Gutsche, the emperor had asked the archduke to ‘secure from the German emperor a declaration as to whether we could continue to count unconditionally on Germany in the future’. The archduke reported that the results had been disappointing: ‘the German emperor dodged the question and failed to provide us with an answer’.51
There is good reason to accept this version of events, because it accords with the general trend in Wilhelm’s communications with the Austrians on the matter of Serbia during the last twelve months before the war. Far from pressing for aggressive or provocative Austrian action against the Serbs, Wilhelm consistently focused on low-risk diplomatic solutions. In a conversation of October 1913 with the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, for example, he conceded that Serbia must accept the regional dominance of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but his specific prescriptions for the Austrians were unequivocally pacific. The ambassador reported that ‘His Majesty imagines a solution to the problem in the following terms, namely that we draw the Serbs to us by means of everything they lack, that is (1) money (starting from the king downwards, they can all be had for money) (2) military training (3) improvements in the terms of trade.’ Only if all these measures failed would the Austrians be justified in employing violence in order to secure compliance.52
A report of 16 December 1913 from the Austrian envoy in Munich described a similar conversation, in which Wilhelm argued that the key to a successful diplomacy vis-à-vis Serbia depended on Austria’s willingness to make concessions: ‘In my view Count Berchtold could secure a solid foothold [in Belgrade] if he blithely sacrificed a few millions, opened wide the Theresianum [the monarchy’s foremost military academy] as well as the Academies and Institutes [to Serbian candidates], and offered various other advantages that would help to prepare for the future.’53 The same theme – that the monarchy should seek to displace France by offering to alleviate Serbia’s financial crisis with advantageous loans – cropped up in a further discussion of the Balkan question with Szögyényi on 12 March 1914.
So consistent was Wilhelm’s emphasis upon a policy of peaceful coexistence with Serbia that his Viennese interlocutors grew frustrated at the German emperor’s apparent inability to recognize the seriousness of the threat facing the monarchy from Belgrade. One of the central themes of Austrian diplomacy in Berlin during the autumn of 1913 and the spring of 1914, was an effort to raise German awareness of the difficulties that obstructed a peaceful resolution of the quarrel with Serbia. But in spite of these efforts, Emperor Franz Joseph complained in an order to Berchtold of 16 May 1914, ‘the people in Berlin [had] not yet freed themselves from the notion of a political rapprochement between Austria–Hungary and Serbia’. Wilhelm was seen as a particular problem in this regard, the emperor observed, since his most recent remarks on the subject showed that no progress had been made in correcting his misunderstanding of the Serbian problem. The note closed with an order to the effect that cuttings from the chauvinist Serbian press should be forwarded to Berlin and presented to the Kaiser, so that he might gain a sense of the intransigent anti-Habsburg mood of Serbian political circles.54 But the Austrian efforts achieved little: as late as 1 July 1914, three days after the assassination at Sarajevo, the Hungarian prime minister, Istvàn Tisza, urged Franz Joseph to exploit a planned (but subsequently aborted) visit by Wilhelm to Vienna ‘in view of recent appalling events, to combat the pro-Serbian prejudice of that sovereign Gentleman’.55
It would be misleading, then, to dismiss Wilhelm’s public assurances of peaceful intentions – most notably in his jubilee speech of 16 June 1913 to the Reichstag deputies – as a ‘hypocritical’ camouflage for a fundamentally belligerent diplomacy. Wilhelm struck the same tone in various less public contexts. He told Admiral Müller that he wished his reign to be one of consolidation rather than expansion.56 In a conversation with the Baden envoy Berckheim on 11 March 1914, he observed that ‘the greatest reserve and caution must be the general principle of our policy’, and promised that, ‘whatever the situation, He, the Emperor, would never wage a preventive war’. On the evening of the same day, Lyncker, chief of the Military Cabinet, regretfully confirmed that the Kaiser remained unimpressed by the military arguments for seizing the ‘present favourable moment’ to embark upon the ‘inevitable conflict’.57 During the same month, Gevers, the Dutch envoy in Berlin, observed that the emperor was ‘in far too frequent contact with the world of finance and industry’ to take lightly ‘the truly catastrophic consequences of a European conflict’ and had recently articulated ‘an entirely pacific stance’ in his discussions with the Italian ambassador.58 Small wonder that when, on 16 March 1914, Conrad mentioned the possibility of an early war against Russia to the German ambassador in Vienna, the latter objected: ‘Two important people are against it, your Archduke Franz Ferdinand and my Kaiser.’59
July 1914
The news of the Sarajevo assassination of 28 June 1914 reached Wilhelm aboard the royal yacht Hohenzollern. After some discussion with advisers, he agreed that the yacht should return immediately to Berlin so that he could ‘take the situation in hand and preserve the peace of Europe’.60 On 2 July, a report dated 30 June from the German ambassador in Vienna conveyed the Austrian view that the assassination had been planned in Belgrade and observed that it was the view in Vienna, ‘even among serious people’, that Austria should now seek ‘a final and fundamental reckoning with the Serbs’. The Serbs should first be ‘presented with a number of demands, and in case they should not accept these, energetic measures should be taken’. Tschirschky added that he personally took every opportunity to ‘advise quietly but very emphatically and seriously against too hasty steps’. In his marginal comments on this document, Wilhelm endorsed the notion that a reckoning with the Serbs was sorely needed, appending the words ‘now or never’. But he objected to Tschirschky’s efforts to dissuade Vienna from energetic action: ‘Let Tschirschky be good enough to drop this nonsense! The Serbs must be swept up, and that right soon!’61
Several classic accounts of the July crisis have identified Wilhelm’s comments on this document as a crucial milestone in the radicalization of German diplomacy after Sarajevo: according to Immanuel Geiss, ‘the Kaiser’s drastically formulated wish to dispose of the Serbs “soon” and his “now or never” supplied the decisive catchwords for subsequent German policy […] [T]he marginal notes had the effect of an imperial command.’ After the Kaiser had ‘come down on the side of the General Staff, the political leaders fell in with the monarch’s commands, i
n accordance with time-honoured German tradition’.62 It is doubtful, however, whether these marginal comments can be considered as ‘commands’ in any meaningful sense. Quite apart from the question as to whether Wilhelm’s marginal comments ever carried the weight of ‘commands’ in the sense that they could prevail over an established consensus among the responsible ministers, there is no evidence to support the view that Wilhelm’s notes prompted a hardening in the line taken by ambassador Tschirschky in Vienna; on 2 July, the day that Wilhelm saw and annotated his report, the ambassador was affirming the need for ‘ruthless action’, possibly under the influence of spurious Austrian reports that a twelve-man Serbian murder squad had been intercepted on its way to assassinate the Kaiser in Berlin.63 As for his own comments on Serbia, Wilhelm insisted that it must be the Austrians themselves who decided how they wished to respond to the assassination: ‘it is solely the affair of Austria what she plans to do in this case’.64
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